Members of the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team gathered at the stately Hanover Inn near campus on a dreary, rainy Tuesday and made their way to a small office building where they smiled for a group photo. Then they went up to a second-floor conference room and took a vote that was six months — or rather, many years — in the making.
When the yellow sheets of paper were counted and validated about an hour later, the basketball players had accomplished something no other college athlete had done.
With a vote of 13-2 they had formed a union.
“It’s definitely getting more real,” Cade Haskins, a junior on the basketball team and leader of the effort, told about a dozen reporters after the vote. “We know this could potentially make history. That’s not why we did it, but doing that can be scary and scary.”
Haskins expressed hope that his peers across the Ivy League and the rest of the country will soon be recognized as employees under federal labor law — a classification that has been a red line for college athletes who would be forced to share revenue directly with their athletes.
But at a time when college sports’ amateur model is buckling under the pressure of antitrust lawsuits, unfair labor challenges and declining support in Congress, it’s unclear whether Tuesday’s election will be remembered as a signature or a footnote.
There is no visible movement to organize by other Dartmouth groups. And a reminder that the case is far from over just before the vote: Dartmouth filed an appeal of a regional director’s decision last month to classify the players as employees with the full National Labor Relations Board, which has jurisdiction only over individuals employers.
(Nearly a decade ago, a district manager gave Northwestern’s football team the right to vote to form a union, but when the board refused to assert jurisdiction in the case, the votes, which had been confiscated, were destroyed before they could be counted. )
Dartmouth could eventually appeal the board’s decision to a federal appeals court, meaning the case may not be resolved until the current players graduate.
In a statement, the college called the unionization vote inappropriate: “Classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is both unprecedented and inaccurate.”
Also Tuesday, a House subcommittee announced a hearing next week on “Protecting Student-Athletes from NLRB Misclassification.”
When asked how far the Dartmouth players were from the finish line, Haskins said, “We’re closer than we started.”
The vote is the latest flexing of organized labor, whose nationwide activity — and popularity — has grown, with the support of the Biden administration, to levels not seen since the 1960s.
However, Dartmouth is a somewhat unlikely hub of activism. It doesn’t have a rich history of riots like the University of California, Berkeley. The war in Gaza has not shaken the campus to the extent that it has at other Ivy League schools. The school is in a remote location and has the smallest enrollment in the Ivy League (4,556 undergraduates), giving organizers only so much oxygen in a place whose independent streak is imbued with the state’s motto: Live Free or Die.
However, the basketball team is just the latest Dartmouth group to organize in the past two years, following college students, graduate students and library workers. The student advisors are in the process of setting up a union.
“The last few years have been a whirlwind of labor activity in this tiny, rural place,” said Marc Dixon, the chair of the sociology department, who studies labor issues. “The pace was really wild.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this local flurry of activity had its roots in the coronavirus pandemic.
When Dartmouth students returned to campus with a hybrid program in the fall of 2020, students who worked at the two campus restaurants felt stuck. They needed $11-an-hour jobs, but they also felt particularly vulnerable to the virus.
Around the time the food service workers began organizing, their effort received a boost: Dartmouth announced in the fall of 2021 that its endowment had generated a whopping 46 percent return in the previous fiscal year, rising to $8 billion. (Dartmouth said at the time it would raise its minimum wage from $7.75 to $11.50.)
About six months later, food service workers had voted to unionize.
When negotiations with the college stalled, workers voted to strike in February 2023. Dartmouth immediately relented — raising food service workers pay to $21 an hour, along with agreeing to Covid-19 sick pay and overtime for evening shifts.
“As a freshman, you’re not in a position to get a research job,” said Ian Scott, a senior who worked in the dish room at a campus cafe and was an organizer. “Food service is where you go when you can’t be picky. A lot of people who work there were — and still are — low-income people of color who need help.”
This game was watched by Haskins, who worked in a cafeteria. He also plays basketball. (About half of the team members have jobs at the school.)
Haskins, a junior from Minneapolis majoring in politics, philosophy and economics, had struck up a friendship with Walter Palmer, a former Dartmouth player who works in the alumni office. Palmer, who remains the most recent Dartmouth player to be drafted by the NBA, in 1990, helped form the first players union in Europe and has also worked for the NBA Players Association. He connected the players with the local Service Employees Union – and other influential figures such as Tony Clark, the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association.
Plans were soon made to take their case to the NLRB in September after the three freshmen on this year’s team arrived. (Haskins and Romeo Myrthil, a junior from Solna, Sweden, who is studying computer science, were considered ideal leaders because they wouldn’t graduate until next year.)
“We take an oath to organize the unorganized, but it doesn’t really say what that means,” said Chris Peck, a painter who is the longtime president of Local 560. “College athletes — how does that fit in? You assume they come from money and have taken the world by the tail. Then you hear that they are doing jobs in addition to going for practice and studying. It was a similar story with the dining room workers.”
This case, however, does not fit well in any box.
Dartmouth, like the rest of the Ivy League schools, does not offer athletic scholarships — only need-based financial aid. And the basketball team didn’t reap tens of millions like Kansas or Kentucky. In fact, it is subsidized by Dartmouth, which has incurred losses of more than $3.2 million operating the program over the past five years, according to testimony at the hearing. (Distributions from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and the Ivy League’s television contract with ESPN are categorized as athletic department revenue.)
In granting the players employee status, the district director who tried the case, Laura A. Sacks, ruled that the six pairs of basketball shoes (worth $200 apiece) were given to the players each season and the two to four tickets provided in each player The game for their family and friends served as compensation and thus put the players under the control of the college.
It also ruled that another form of compensation is access to the “early read” admissions process because of their value as basketball players.
Those are among the issues Dartmouth, which recently hired the same lawyers representing the University of Southern California in an NLRB case arguing that football and men’s and women’s basketball players are employees, is opposing its appeal to the full board. Law firm Morgan Lewis also represents SpaceX, Amazon and Trader Joe’s, companies that challenged the NLRB’s authority
While there seems to be general support for basketball players, there doesn’t seem to be a widespread willingness on campus to take on the hard work of organizing athletes in many of the other 33 sports that Dartmouth sponsors.
New rules allowing athletes to earn money from endorsements have prompted them to think about their circumstances, a member of the men’s hockey team said.
“I think the kids are comfortable with the way things are,” said the player, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized by Dartmouth to speak to the media. “We’re playing hockey and going to a school that we’re really excited about. It’s a choice we make to come here, so you accept the pros and cons.”
He also noted that the team is having its best season in nearly a decade.
That’s not the case with the men’s basketball team, which has had a lackluster season, anchored in last place in the Ivy League. But when the Big Green mounted a spirited rally to beat Harvard on Tuesday night, it allowed them to end their 6-21 season with a smile — and a second win on the day.
